Tag Archives: BlogTalkRadio’s Judy Joy Jones Show

EDITOR’S NOTE, June 8, 2010: In response to criticism about her May 27, 2010 comments to Rabbi David Nesenoff on the state of Isreal—namely that the Israeli Jews “should go home” to “Poland, Germany…America and everywhere else”—Helen Thomas resigned from her position as a columnist with Hearst Newspapers on June 7.

NEW YORK, July 3, 2009 (BlogTalkRadio): Unabashed John F. Kennedy fan though she is, Helen Thomas is less than thrilled with the current incarnation of Camelot.

Interviewed on the Judy Joy Jones Show, the Godmother of White House correspondents—who has covered every Oval Office occupant since JFK—doesn’t hesitate to opine on America’s commanders-in-chief.

"Why should we go there and kill and die?" Helen (above) says regarding Obama's new military strategy in Afghanistan.

When host Judy Joy Jones comments to Helen, “I’m sure that you don’t have a favorite president. I guess you have to be pretty detached in that regard,” the former UPI bureau chief says:

“No, no, I had a favorite: Kennedy. I thought he was brilliant. I thought he had great ideas.

“He created the Peace Corps. He signed the first nuclear-test-ban treaty. And he said, ‘We’re going to land men on the moon.'”

Shortly after that, she offers her take on our nation’s 44th president.

“He’s disappointing me. He has a conscience, but he doesn’t have the courage to do the things that he should have done—which is single-payer, on medicine,” Helen says of Barack Obama. “Nobody in this country should lack for medical care. We have 47 million people who don’t have any insurance and medicine. And that’s shocking.”

(Single-payer health care is an approach to health-care financing with only one source of money for paying health-care providers. On Wednesday, President Obama rejected the single-payer model, citing instead one that would preserve private insurance companies, while offering a government-run option.)

Helen also slams the president”s foreign policy.

Helen covering her No. 1 presidential pick.

“He’s going into Afghanistan, and he’s broadened the war. He has not learned the lessons of Vietnam and Iraq,” says the veteran journalist, who currently writes a column for the Hearst Newspapers syndicate, and whose new book, Listen Up, Mr. President: Everything You Always Wanted Your President to Know and Do, will be published in the fall.

“We should not be there. To put U.N. peacekeeper forces there would be fine. But to get involved in another no-win war?

“Afghans know every cave, they know every stream, they know every mountain. It’s their country.”

“You know what I really wanna do is, I wanna get written into Weeds. I think that would be a great show for me to be on.

“So I hope some writer or producer calls soon and says, ‘You’re made for our TV show!'” says Rickie of the Showtime series about a California soccer mom (Mary-Louise Parker) whose hubby suddenly drops dead, prompting her to sell marijuana to make ends meet.

During the 60-minute interview, Rickie also discusses her frustration with the fair sex’s place in the music industry.

“There’s only one or two token ‘chairs’ for women. And once one of them gets in it, nobody else can have it,” says the Chuck E.’s in Love singer.

Fellow diva Joni (above): Time to scoot over?

“Joni Mitchell has had the chair for a long time. And nobody else is allowed to have the credibility that Joni Mitchell has. It’s as if Joni Mitchell created all music.

“And this is not her fault. This is because of sex- ism and they just don’t have the time, the patience or interest to discuss other women as important, viable, iconic figures.”

To hear Rickie’s full interview – in which she also discusses her recent move to a mountain retreat, her intellectual-property feud with David Bowie, why she wants to do a record comprised of songs about horses and trucks, and her gripe with the Democratic party – click here.

After her parents split up in 1931, Maya, then three, moved from her hometown of St. Louis to San Francisco with her mother and brother.

Twelve years later, she would break her first racial barrier, by becoming the city’s first black female streetcar conductor.

The road to that achievement, however, was a painful one, as she tells host Judy Joy Jones on this week’s Judy Joy Jones Show.

“I was 15. I had come back from being with my father in San Diego. And I had missed about four weeks of school. But I was ahead, so my mother said I didn’t have to go to school that semester – but I had to have a job,” says Maya, now 80, whose latest book is titled Letters to My Daughter.

“Now, I had seen women on the streetcar in their uniforms with their change belt; you know, that little metal thing – ‘click, click.’ And they had caps with bibs on them. And they looked so cute.

“So I went down to apply for a job. And I didn’t notice there were no blacks. I just saw women. But no one would even offer me an application. So I went back to my mother and I was really devastated.

“She asked me, ‘Do you know why?’ I said, ‘Yes, because I’m a negro.’ She said, ‘Do you want the job?’ I said, ‘Yes.’

“‘Then go get it,’ she said. ‘You be there before the secretaries come in in the morning. And you stay there. And when they go to lunch, then you go to lunch . . . But be back before the secretaries.’

“Well, I did it. And I’ll tell you, I almost died. Because the girls who worked there were so rude. [But] I sat there.

“So after about two weeks, a man came out of the office [and] asked me, ‘You want to work on the streetcars?’ He asked me what kind of experience I had.

“I lied. I told him I had been a chaufferette by the name of Annie Henderson in Stamps, Arkansas.

“Annie Henderson was my grandmother. I don’t even think she had ever even ridden in a car. They gave me the job, though!”